eXensible Markup Language (XML) is a popular meta-language used to define other languages of data exchange and business communications. XML describes data and messages using easily understood tags. Thus XML is increasingly used in a number of business services and applications, including mission-critical financial transactions and real-time medical processing. Such critical business applications often require rapid responses through real-time communications of various messages, and now XML messages.
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a common messaging protocol that communicates XML messages among applications using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). SOAP is a platform independent messaging protocol that provides an “envelope” containing a message header and a message body. The message header can accommodate customized messaging properties such as time and data formats. However, there is no standard mechanism in SOAP to define real-time XML messages.
fisdMessage protocol is an industry standard intended for the exchange of data between financial entities such as brokerage firms and banks. In the financial industry, Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) is the common XML derivative employed in data transfer. fisdMessage supports binary encoded XML content with a standards-based real-time streaming data feed. Current fisdMessage encodes an XML message only with a timestamp but other critical parameters for real-time messaging such as identifier, expiry, priority and acknowledgement are absent.
A number of XML hardware devices are available for fast XML routing, parsing and processing. Some versions of XML accelerators improve XML parsing through hardware processing of XML documents, XML schemas and XPath queries. Some XML routers speed up XML message forwarding through hardware support of SOAP and XPath. The hardware accelerations speed up processing of those XML protocols but do not support the real-time nature of XML messaging and routing.
What are needed are a method and a system to provide real-time XML messaging over a communication network. The present invention satisfies this need and provides additional advantages.